mounting external harddisk with fstab-sync as a non-root user

Didier Casse elprodigio at gmail.com
Thu Apr 21 04:55:42 UTC 2005


On 4/21/05, David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 00:34 +0800, Didier Casse wrote:
> > How to enable Gnome or fstab-sync to mount the drive so that a normal
> > user can read it?
> 
> This is known to work out of the box with vfat, other file systems (such
> as ext3) have permission bits that may mean you cannot read or write the
> files; it all depends on what file system you are using. Bypassing that
> doesn't sound like a particular good idea to me. Using such file systems
> on removable media is not a very good idea either IMHO.

Hi David,
               Thanks for the reply.

Actually it's a friend's external hard drive. The file system is NTFS.
Well it's because he uses it on his Windows box too and wants Linux to
read the data... which the latter does magnifically but one has to
become root to see it! I just installed FC dual boot on his laptop.

You mean one way would be to convert the file system to FAT32 and get over it! 
For me it wouldn't be a problem. 

But I guess you should know that when people come from a Windows
world, they expect something to work more or less exactly the same.
That means in Windows, he just plugs in the drive, immediately
recognized by the system, device mounted, reads and writes then
unplugs.

He told me writing was not a problem. He only wants to read from it.

Those external hard disks are getting really popular nowadays and a
lot of people would get one in the near future... What are Redhat's
plans for things like these?

Again thanks for the reply. If there's no other solution, I guess I'll
tell him to convert the filesystem.

-- 
Cheers,
Didier.

------------
Didier F.B Casse | PhD candidate | LiMiNT Beamline
Singapore Synchrotron Light Source (SSLS), 5 Research Link, Singapore 117603
Email: elprodigioREMOVE_THIS_ANTISPAM_MOJO at gmail.com|
Web: http://ssls.nus.edu.sg | GPG Key 1024D/B3C57D01 2004-06-23




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list